What is the Work of Remembering?: Learning About Scholar-Activism and Documenting Black Grassroots Heritage Preservation with UMass PhD Candidate Marcus P. Smith
Every year, Marcus P. Smith’s family would gather in their home in Winona, Mississippi to hear his grandmother, Bernice Purnell Cain, recite their family’s oral history. After his grandmother was done reciting, she would invite Smith, the eldest grandchild of the family, to speak. Smith didn’t know it then, but this experience would set him on the path towards his PhD project in the Afro-American Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “In my work,” says Smith, “I document and celebrate the histories of struggle and accomplishment of Black communities across the United States and the inspiring efforts of those communities to preserve those histories to envision a better future for themselves.”
Smith’s dissertation project is titled “This Proud Home: Grassroots Museums, Historic Preservation, and Social Change in the Rural and Coastal South.” In this project, he studies community histories as preserved by the communities themselves – hence, “grassroots museums” – and shows how such local-level initiatives contribute to larger-scale narratives and can push towards social change. “It’s extremely demanding physically, mentally, and spiritually to engage in fieldwork long term,” says Smith, having completed a year of fieldwork in August 2025 across Maryland, Mississippi, and Florida supported by the prestigious Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
Smith’s fieldwork has been elaborate and challenging because his work borrows from several disciplines. He is best described as a Black Studies scholar who draws from historical research methods, oral history, cultural anthropology, and ethnography. This means that he has worked with archives and other historical evidence, while also collecting and recording oral histories through interviewing individuals and communities that have set up these grassroots museums. At the same time, he conducts ethnographic research by living with and participating in these communities. He works hard to nurture connections and give back to the communities – and is often even invited to church and family dinner with these communities!
Smith arrived at UMass after having majored in Political Science with minors in English Literature and Afro-American Studies at the University of Houston and having completed his MA in African American Studies with a concentration in Community Empowerment at Georgia State University. This background sharpened his focus on the political, economic, and policy responses to the impediments of African and African-descendant community development.
At UMass, he is slated to earn a graduate certificate in Public History alongside his doctoral degree. In 2023, Smith attended the Black Life in Bellevue Field School in Maryland where he began to see how he could bring together his scholarly interests with his commitment to serving communities. This informs how Smith thinks of his work and its relationship with the world around him.
One of Smith’s guiding principles is to strive for academic excellence with social responsibility. It is important to him to be able to explain why and how his research will contribute to the lives of the communities he studies. “The dissertation is the easy part,” laughs Smith, “honoring the stories and lives I research, the ethics are the hard part.” According to him, the communities he studies need to know that he is invested in preserving their heritage so that they can, in turn, feel assured that they will be represented correctly in his work.
Smith has dedicated his energies also to activist work and grassroots organizing, which goes hand-in-hand with his academic accomplishments. One example of this is his work, starting August 2025, as a History and Interpretation Fellow for the Du Bois Freedom Center in Great Barrington, MA where he now lives. His work here is part of a grassroots initiative dedicated to restoring the historic Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church and developing a museum honoring the life and legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, Great Barrington’s Black community, and Black history in the Berkshires. Smith has also served as a docent at both the W.E.B. Du Bois National Historic Site and the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church.
Smith takes this further by saying, “The question is what the people need.” And it is his answer to this question that makes his project innovative and unconventional. Alongside the traditional dissertation that earns scholars their PhD, he has also founded an expansive digital archive called the Black Grassroots Heritage Preservation Network (BGHPN). The digital archive—developed in collaboration with UMass alumna Katrina Rojas’s Katrina Rojas Design Studio—features podcast interviews, a pioneering interactive map highlighting nearly 400 Black grassroots heritage preservation projects, and in-depth profiles of specific sites. Through Smith's tireless work, BGHPN functions as a tool to record, amplify, and promote grassroots heritage. It works as a storytelling platform and towards advocacy. Smith considers his work on the BGHPN to be the core of his work and what he is “giving back” to the communities he is researching. He doesn’t intend the BGHPN to be a static database or map, but instead envisions it as a dynamic and alive network of local Black history. “I want a schoolchild in Alabama to type in their address and see all the Black history near them and get a sense of their own history,” says Smith.
In September 2025, the BGHPN became an organizational partner of Black in Historic Preservation (BiHP)—which maintains a public directory of Black individuals who practice and study historic preservation and heritage conservation. With them, the BGHPN now co-sponsors a national IRB-approved Preservation + Belonging survey which seeks to record and examine the experiences of being Black and belonging within the field of historic preservation. This survey is slated to be published in BiHPs forthcoming Preserving Black Heritage Sites + Preserving Black Preservationists Guide in 2026.
"I don’t want ownership over knowledge...The work is all mine, but it is not a Marcus project. Nothing worthwhile is done alone."
While he is committed to giving back to the communities he researches, Smith also acknowledges the individuals and networks that support him. He credits his undergraduate mentors for setting him on the path to Black Studies and highlights the support he has received from his dissertation chair at UMass, Dr Yolanda Covington-Ward. “I don’t want ownership over knowledge,” he says of the BGHPN and his dissertation, “The work is all mine, but it is not a Marcus project. Nothing worthwhile is done alone.” Up next for Smith completing his dissertation and earning his PhD, all while growing the BGHPN, working one step at a time in community with those whom he trusts and who place their trust in him.
Written by Meenakshi Nair, PhD student in English, as part of the Graduate School's Public Writing Fellows Program.